[lil-lugger]

Anyone who thinks we should just live in a “pure meritocracy” is a little bit delusional. Maybe they’ve played too many RPG’s where players have stats and you can sort by attribute and pick the best. If that was the case in the real world there would no job interview, just sharing statistics and picking the candidates with the highest numbers. Employers have to evaluate people on how they will perform BEFORE they perform, on subjective grounds. So for any number of reasons, probably subconsciously, people who are more unattractive, short, or possibly of a different race than the hirer can be perceived to be qualified but ‘not a good fit’. There are always ways around excluding people without it seeming discriminatory. That’s not to say there should be quotas, but to think there’s no issue because we should just pick the best candidate never stop to ask “how? How do you know they are the best?”.

[civilized]

I agree that we need to take seriously the history of racism in the US and try to mitigate its impacts. From what I have seen, the consideration of race in admissions and hiring doesn't remove bias, but adds a bias in an opposite direction. I have talked to people who have been involved in hiring processes, and many can cite examples where candidates from URM groups have been given a great deal more credit than non-URM candidates were given for a similar or higher level of achievement/qualification. It's hardly a secret that in job markets with a high emphasis on racial diversity, the highly underrepresented minority is often a hot commodity who is judged by a different standard.

I think it's valid to argue that this bias is worth it. But we should not pretend that we are simply remedying bias or pushing people towards a more fair evaluation of each candidate for their individual qualities. What we're doing is adding an opposite bias in an attempt to approach closer to proportional racial representation.

There's also reasonable room to question if we should essentially equate diversity to population-proportional racial representation, as we do today. This is also a bias which may take away from seeking diversity along other lines, such as class/upbringing, age, and being outside traditional recruiting networks for the job.

[lapcat]

> This is also a bias which may take away from seeking diversity along other lines, such as class/upbringing, age, and being outside traditional recruiting networks for the job.

I'm glad you mentioned age. Age discrimination and lack of age diversity is a big problem in tech.

Whenever there's a discussion about underrepresented groups in tech, isn't it funny how older people are rarely considered?

[DagsEoress]

> “how? How do you know they are the best?”.

The answer is you don't. But just because the system isn't perfect doesn't mean we should just throw it in the blender. By that logic we should get rid of "free" health care / safety nets in Western European countries. It mostly works but it also gets exploited. How can you know people aren't exploiting the system? You can't know for sure, but we can do our best to find out.

[Xeamek]

But nobody is saying that. Having hiring quotas is far from throwing entire system out the window.

[endisneigh]

Your comparison is inane. What’s the connection between dei and getting rid of safety nets? Not to mention that dei is not inherently unmeritocratic to begin with

[yes_really]

The difference is that employers at least *try* to pick the best candidate by ignoring characteristics such as attractiveness and height. For race and gender, it's the opposite: employers actively give preference to certain races and to women.

[AmericanChopper]

This “pure meritocracy” argument simply boils down to the fact that it’s not possible to build a system that perfectly measures how prospective candidates will perform in the future. Really, all businesses and institutions should be free to innovate their own methodologies for doing that, and live with whatever consequences they produce, with the governments role being to regulate the limits of permissible discrimination. Race has been a class legally protected from discrimination for quite some time now, and it’s honestly pretty sad that it’s taken this long to get a ruling on this open and unapologetic racial discrimination.